II ENGLISH CLASSTEST 1st TERM

 

I, Too.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well.

And grow strong.

 

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes

Nobody ’ll dare

Say to me,

“eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed –

I, too, am America.

 

 

“I too” is the title of the poem. The title doesn’t anticipate the theme of the poem.

This poem is made up of two stanzas. The first stanza has got seven lines, the second stanza has got 11 lines. The poem tells about an American person but he isn’t seen positively by society. He is different because his skin is dark and for the “white” people he is inferior. He therefore wants to become an important person so that nobody was look at the colour of his skin because now he is important too.

The verbs in the first stanza are in the simple present because the poet expresses the concept of the man’s present situation.

There aren’t rhymes or alliterations. The first stanza communicated the sense of refusal of the protagonist of the poem. He describes how other people behave with him, what they tell him and how he feels.

In the second stanza the verbs are in the simple future because the writer may want to express how the people will look at the “darker” one in the future. There aren’t rhymes and alliterations as in the first stanza.

The second stanza may describe the change of the people from a generation to another one. Now the Americans look at the “darker” brother in the same way as if they and he were part of America.

So he is Americans too. They look in a different way at the darker brother, they don’t send  him into the corner because differences is now accepted.

Now they are accepted by the world, he were like the rest of them.